Valentine's Day Heart Soap

Happy Valentine's Day!

Ah, the pinkest of holidays...I had some time for a project today while my boyfriend was making me a pink cake so we were working side-by-side, awww...

I read about Martha Stewart's Heart-Shaped Soap in her Encyclopedia of Crafts and had to try it.  That's where I found out about this amazing resource: Majestic Mountain Sage in Logan, Utah.  How impressive is this?: they have everything you need to make soaps, creams, perfumes, lip balm, lotions and more including essential oils, molds, recipes, ingredient calculators, books, bottles, labels....and a blog too.  Wow!  I ordered 5 pounds of clear and 5 pounds of white glycerin melt-and-pour soap (which was carried home Friday night with the rest of the haul I needed for the weekend).

I'd say the hardest part was getting the glycerin out of the buckets: there must be some way to get the perfecly shaped, little cubes that Martha has in her tutorial.  Other than that it was pretty simple: coat a tray with vaseline to hinder sticking, melt the glycerin slowly in the microwave, stir in some food coloring and scent (I used grapefruit essential oil) and pour into the tray. 

Martha also recommends spritzing with alcohol to eliminate air bubbles.  That worked pretty well, but I somehow got a bit of clouding to the clear soap that wasn't planned for, so I think I'll ask the folks at Majestic Moutain Sage if there was something else I should have been doing to monitor the melting process.

It didn't take too long to set, maybe a couple of hours and it was ready to be cut.  Thankfully after the first one or two shapes were carved out, the rest were extracted very easily.

I stamped some messages into each heart: a little hard to see in the pic, but it was fun to do.  That's also some Heart-Covered Wax Paper from Martha (just stamp out some construction paper hearts, layer between sheets of wax paper, cover with paper towels and dry iron to fuse the layers together, simple!)

And just like with sugar cookies, you can reuse the scraps you have left over after you cut out all the hearts you want.  I'm going to have to make more soap soon, but now it's time for Valentine's Day Dinner, have a good one :-)

And P.S. Happy Chinese New Year too...